PoBiz Stock Index Update, 4 April 2016

Second-Gen ConPo Visions instruments have risen slowly in past four months after Board signaled that remaining stock held in ConPo Central Industries would be sold off. “In Poetry as in Business,” remarked Vice-President of Second-Gen ConPo Visions, Divysa Victorious, “you have no choice sometimes but to throw family under the bus. It’s a tough world.” Prices for the company rose sharply on the news, especially in its “Be a Poetry Foundation Blogger Courses Video Division,” but have fallen in the past two days. President Joseph Kablam could not be reached for comment, and worrying rumors that he has disappeared of his own accord into the Sonora persist.

Commune Editions stock rose nearly 20% on April 1st, National Poetry Month, on news released by the PoFo, Inc. that President-Comrade Gonzalo Joshua Cloveroski, author of the blockbuster Rojo Épico, now in feature film production, would be blogging for the PoFo, Inc. at a special negotiated salary. PoBiz Stock Reports was unable to determine what this salary amount is, but PoFo Board Chair Henry Bienen, formerly consultant for the State Department, the National Security Council, the Agency for International Development, the CIA, the World Bank, and Boeing, admitted it was a tough, but finally win-win settlement. “Part of our mission,” said Bienen, “is that we want poetry to be forever a place for everyone, so that people can see they don’t have to go out and do things in opposition, and stuff, like back in the 60s. The new message,” he continued, nearly shouting his last two words, “is that we can all just pretty much get along.” When asked if it might be possible to compare the role of PoFo, Inc. vis-a-vis post-avant American poetry to the role of the CIA vis-a-vis Abstract Expressionism and various literary journals in the 1950s and later, Bienen replied that, “No, not really, because this is much easier. You don’t even have to send them to Europe.”

In related news, Daniel Borbinsky, of Market Yourself as a White Chilean, Inc., also a blogger for the PoFo, Inc. and translator of the CADA activist Raúl Zurita (who had previously praised young Situationist-like protesters for their civil disobedience actions at the Poetry Foundation some years back, when all of them nearly ended up in one of the most violent prisons of the world), expressed his pleasure at the sudden burst of trading activity around his startup, hinting that it would soon move into broader territory, to include the entire Southern Cone countries of Latin America. “This would involve only a few additional shifts in resources and almost no reorientation in marketing,” stated Borbinsky, “because in Uruguay and Argentina, thanks to the Spanish elimination of superfluous indigenous peoples, 90% of the population is recognizably white, and some white people even have perfectly European names.”

Breaking news–Poetry and Monetary Policy: Just this morning, at the Harriet Blog, a division of PoFo, Inc.‘s Corporate Communication Department, Stephanie Younger and Tom You exchanged strategic views on the matter of making money from poetry, recognizing that liquidity issues did exist among most sectors of the general poetic economy. Both expressed astonishment and admiration, however, that the PoFo, Inc. had so much cash on hand, almost as much as the entire government of Canada. “I make my little bit of money from the University of Wisconsin,” said the penurious You, “but it is nice to have places like the Poetry Foundation around, even if they are somewhat entwined with Capital and the National Security State at their highest levels.” Younger, apparently, agreed.

In other news, prices for LA Temporary Solutions for Poetry stock rose on news of hiring activity related to vast custodial cleanup after the AWP Convention. “You know, I don’t want to sound mean, but these poets are really smelly, filthy pigs,” said Ruby Williams, with a sigh, in midst of airing out a room where a Prize-winning poet is reported to have lodged for a number of days.